Are USAID Funds Being Used for Covert Operations in Central Africa?

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By Georgianne Nienaber (about the author) Page 4 of 6 page(s)

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ESRI Corporation (www.esri.com) is self-described as “the world leader in GIS (geographic information system) modeling and mapping software and technology.”

ESRI is a key contractor for the U.S. Department of Defense and Intelligence sector, providing battle theatre GIS mapping and support technologies used, for example, for “a defense-wide infrastructure, supporting fighting missions, command and control, installation management, and strategic intelligence.”
http://www.esri.com/industries/defense/business/military_ops.html

Remote sensing of gorilla habitat reportedly provides essential information about food sources, like the availability of species of bamboos, or encroaching threats from slash-and-burn agriculture, or other changes to gorilla habitat. But the remote sensing arena has proliferated due to the efficacy of these technologies in identifying deposits of minerals or hydrocarbons (oil & gas)—prospecting from aerospace platforms—and the data was therefore far more significant than a few species of bamboos.

According to two independent inside sources, the 21 data CD’s from the ESSI/ESRI remote sensing over-flights ostensibly for Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International were delivered directly by the DFGFI’s CEO Clare Richardson into the hands of Rwandan President Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Minister of Defense.

“These guys aren't looking for habitat,” comments one remote sensing expert (who has visited the facilities of ESSI), “they are looking for oil, which is what they do, and they probably got funding for habitat assessment from USAID and are using the data to provide their owners with oil, minerals and uranium info. I'm not aware of any natural resource vegetative project that they have done in the past. It strictly sounds like taking the taxpayer dollar to fatten some oil guys pockets.”

The Albertine Rift area and so-called World Heritage Sites of the border zone between Uganda, Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo are at present enmeshed in massive petroleum and natural gas exploration and exploitation projects.

Some 1000 people a day die in war-torn Eastern Congo due to guerrilla warfare and covert operations. The extent of western petroleum, mining or military involvement in Eastern Congo is never reported by the international press.

Former CNN journalist Gary Strieker became a member of the DFGFI Board of Trustees. Strieker was the CNN journalist embedded with the Rwandan Patriotic Army during the Pentagon’s covert operation that overthrew the government of Juvenal Habyarimana in Rwanda in 1994.

CNN is deeply embedded with the Pentagon in reporting the U.S. government slant on military operations in U.S. military hotspots, including Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and Sudan.

CNN reportage never establishes any connections to, or stories about, the deeper, hidden realities of western involvement in war, mining, extortion, pillage, dictatorship, arms-running, genocide, disease, or population control programs in Central Africa. Like virtually all of the western media, there is never any attention to the perpetuation of structural violence or the institutions of control and domination.

WEIDEMANN CHALLENGES CONSERVATION

In a telling memo written in December 2004, Robert Hellyer—USAID Mission Director for DRC—wrote to the USAID Africa Bureau in Washington regarding the Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE), the “principal vehicle for United States participation in the Congo Basin Forest Project.”

CARPE PARTNERS (Source: Weidemann Report, USAID, CARPE)
Buried in the February 2006 Annex of the supporting documents for the report of the Weidemann Consortium—an evaluation of the CARPE program in Central Africa—is the admission that the rational of “overpopulation” was bogus.

“Of the more than 60 million people that live in the region,” Hellyer wrote, “about 22 million are located in urban areas. At present rates of population growth, the region is expected to contain 150 million people by the year 2025. Population density is on the whole quite low, with a regional average of 14 persons per square kilometer.”

Wildlife conservation and state department interests have repeatedly trumpeted population pressures as the reason for gorilla and habitat decline in Central Africa, yet the above report makes it clear that “population density is on the whole quite low.”

Robert Hellyer elaborates on the global demand for petroleum and timber, and on the adverse impacts of human populations in a landscape—Congo—where “it is in the self-interest of the United States government” to support “sustainable development” in the region. Hellyer confirmed that CARPE and USAID are not interested in the Congolese people, or even biodiversity protection, but only in the interests of the United States.

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Georgianne Nienaber is an investigative environmental and political writer. She lives in rural northern Minnesota, New Orleans and South Florida. Her articles have appeared in The Society of Professional Journalists' Online (more...)

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